The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

water of far-flung irrigation. This all kept me very busy. I had little to add to the conversation.

But my mother would talk. Once she sat down, she would take a couple sips of wine to warm up, and the rest of us would lean in as she filled the space. We were grateful, for the distraction of her. We could float in and out of her speeches, her hand light on the curved neck of the wine bottle. She told us everything about the carpentry co- op, which had managed to hold and even extend her interest; her skills had advanced fast in four years, and she talked about cabinetry, and cutting rabbets, and of the various pitfalls and triumphs involved in ripping a board with a table saw. Of the textural differences between cedar and spruce. Of the mortise, the dowel rack, the transom. She told us about all of the other carpenters, and her opinions of each one, and it was in this way, while I was desperately exploring the distant subtleties of the roast beef, trying to figure out if it was from central California or southern Oregon, that I stumbled across the source of her affair.

Bobbie, Mom said, does not do her share of clean-up.

Amber, she muttered, is a fine craftsman but no visionary.

Larry! she said, voice lifting in a curl, put up the new group assignment:

Desks, she murmured, as if she were talking about roses.

I’d been half listening, sawing off a new piece of the roast beef, still warm and savory and swirling with feeling, beef from Oregon, I’d decided, raised by organic farmers, when the curl-up in her voice matched what was in my mouth. Larry, spoke the roast beef. Larry. I chewed and chewed.

Who’s Larry? I asked, taking a sip of water.

Joseph turned a page of his pamphlet. Dad made neat cuts into his potato.

Larry? Mom said, fixing round eyes on me.

Larry, I said. Is he a regular?

He’s co-op president, she said, shifting in her chair, and no one who had any listening skills could’ve mistaken the glimpse of pride in her voice.

Ah, I said. President. I spit a bit of gristle into my napkin.

How’s the beef?

Fine, I said. Oregon?

I think so, she said. Did you see the wrapper?

No, I said.

We all voted for president, she said, pushing a row of bracelets up her arm. She said it the way a young girl with a crush tries to slip details into a conversation, to prolong the topic without too much emphasis or spotlight. No wonder she’d stayed. Joseph drank a long sip of juice. Dad mopped up his plate with the soft interior of a dinner roll. By then, I’d plowed through enough of the meat to get by, so I got up and went to the pantry where I found a half-eaten cylinder of stale Pringles.

May I? I asked, placing a curved wafer on my tongue.

Mom sank back in her chair. Teenagers, she sighed.

After a few minutes, Dad cleared his plate and excused himself. Joseph returned to his room, where he was working on some homework about electromagnetics. Mom ran a sponge over the counters. After I’d bussed the rest of the table, I wrapped up the remaining roast beef in plastic and put it in the refrigerator for some adultery sandwiches the next day.

I just have to run some errands, Mom said, as the dishwasher began its chugging wash cycle. She said it to the air, as a throwaway: Dad and Joseph had long ago left, but I was just done cleaning, standing in the doorway, and the words fell to me. Something small and fragile punctured, inside my throat. Where? I said. Just to get some materials for my desk project, she said, kissing my cheek. Can I come? I asked. Sorry, Rosebud, she said. You have homework. See you in a couple hours! as she sailed out the door.

15

We still got regular packages of household items from Grandma, slowly mailing her life away in Washington State. They came more frequently now, almost every other week, and in the last one she’d sent me a half-used bar of soap. I didn’t want to use it up, so I put it in a drawer.

She’d started good-those two-tone towels, old-fashioned glass paperweights, even a toy bear-but she seemed to grow more bitter over time, and the items deteriorated until we were opening boxes containing a baggie of batteries, the silver backings of a pair of earrings, a half-checked-off laminated grocery list which made my father twitch. The latest box was in the living room, nudged against the red brick fireplace. A couple years back, I’d asked my mother why Grandma didn’t ever visit in person. Mom bent her head, thinking, zipping the scissors along the narrow center line of the brown box tape.

Grandma doesn’t like to travel, she said.

Then why don’t we go see her? I asked, popping open the flaps.

Grandma doesn’t like guests, Mom said.

I made some kind of questioning peep, and Mom ran a finger lightly over the raw end of the scissor blade.

Your grandmother, she sighed, was raised with seven siblings. So, when she moved into her own household, she wanted quiet.

What do you mean? I asked.

She put down the scissors and scooted closer. Picked up my hand. Look at your pretty nails, she said.

Were you quiet? I said.

She laid my hand on top of hers.

I tried to be, she said. She used to call me garbage truck when I asked for too many things.

She put her cheek down to rest on our matched hands and closed her eyes. She was wearing a new eye shadow, pale pink on her brow bone, and she looked like a flower resting there. How much I wanted to protect her, her frail eyelids, streaked with glimmer. I put a hand lightly on her hair.

That’s mean, I said.

Her lids fluttered. After a few seconds, she sat up and folded the box flaps back fully. She didn’t look inside. All yours, baby, she said. I mean Rose, sorry. Take whatever you’d like.

That evening of her errands, I settled down with the new box. In this load, we had a diminished pad of pale- green Post-its, a book on the history of Oregon with a broken binding, and a bag of crackers. I ate a couple. Stale. Kentucky. I filched the Post-its for my room, and put the rest in the garage next to the bulk of Grandma’s other mailings, wedging it all onto a shelf next to a jar of jam coated in mold that my mother did not want to refrigerate. The brown box was in good shape, so I lugged it over to the hall outside Joseph’s door. New box, I said, rapping on his door. Within minutes, when I walked by again, it had been absorbed into his room.

I still felt upset about the roast beef, so I put in a call to Eliza Greenhouse, my old lunchtime friend with the razor-straight bangs, to ask about the history homework. While it rang, I ripped fringes into the pad of paper by the phone, and when she picked up, someone was screaming in the background. Sorry, she said, laughing. My little sister is having a tickle fight with my dad, she said.

Are you serious? I said.

Stop it! she called past the phone, slapping at someone.

We talked about school for a little while and I tore the fringes into scraps, and after we hung up, my own house felt especially vast. The foundation ticked and settled. All things cleaned and put away. I stood over the trash can and dribbled the torn paper bits out of my fists. That took four minutes. I thought about calling George just to say hi, but I wasn’t sure what a person might say after that, so I left the phone and went into the TV room. My father was sitting on the sofa, reading a newspaper article, his feet wiggling away on the ottoman. He wiggled those feet so often it was like we had a pet in the room.

What are you watching? I asked.

Nothing, he said. He pulled a red leather ledger off a bookshelf, in arm’s reach, and opened it to rows and columns of numbers.

That one soccer-ball drawing spree had been the most eager I had ever seen my father about fatherhood. I’d glimpsed a little me in his eyes then, inhabiting the pupil, sitting next to him in Brazil at the World Cup finals, drinking a beer. But when I’d drawn the faces on the soccer balls, like a TV blinking off, the little me in his eyes had